It is romantic to think of Native Americans stalking through the forest with a bow and arrow in search of food. But by the European entrada, most of the calories in the Indian diet were derived from plants: primarily the traditional squash, beans, and corn, which yielded ample nutrients. Hunting and fishing were still important, particularly as a source of additional protein, and the women gathered a variety of seasonal wild produce. This reliable vegetable-based diet was in place in prehistoric Alabama by about a thousand years ago, and it remained the general diet of most of the southeastern Indian groups until well into the historic period.
Even the Paleo-Indians, despite their reputation as big-game hunters, probably received most of their daily nutrition from gathering fruits, grains, and nuts. A largely vegetable diet was increasingly characteristic of the lengthy Archaic Period (8000 BCE–2000 BCE), during which Indian groups made yearly rounds to hunting and gathering sites for seasonal foods. Late in Archaic times, there was a slow move to rudimentary horticulture of local food plants such as lamb’s quarters, sunflowers (for seeds), and (later) squash. Horticulture intensified in the Woodland Period, when most Native American populations began living in permanent towns near their fields. By about 900–1000 CE, corn had spread from Mexico, and by 1300 CE, beans arrived. (Squash appeared in the area much earlier than either corn or beans.)
In the South, cornfields were owned communally by the tribe and were worked by women, but men helped clear land. Indian women cultivated fields with a hoe and a digging stick, rather than a plow. Women worked the earth into hills and then planted the “three sisters”—corn, beans, and squash—in the same hill. The corn stalks supported the beans, and the squash ran between the hills. The beans released nitrogen into the soil, making up for that taken by the corn. Thus, these plants supported each other in more than one way. The fields were located in the lowlands, often at some distance from the town. Children and old women, perched on elevated platforms, guarded crops from birds and animals, especially as harvest neared.
The three sisters provided all the essential calories, vitamins, and nutrients for a healthy diet. Most Europeans at the time did not eat such a beneficial diet, and many early travelers were greatly impressed by the height, strength, and general health of the Native Americans they encountered. Over time, the Europeans and Africans who came to populate the Southeast adopted many aspects of this diet—and the resulting superior physique—as well. Modern folks, aside from eating at a buffet, can find the three sisters prepared according to traditional Indian methods by knowledgeable living history practitioners, including the authors of this article, who draw on scholarly studies of Native American foods as well as their own experiences to uncover ancient foodways.
Photo Caption: First as gatherers and later as farmers, Native Americans have relied on vegetables, fruits, and other plants as the basis for their food needs. The “Three Sisters”—corn, beans, and squash—were the most important of all, providing sustenance year round.
Squash and Pumpkin
Squash and pumpkin probably originated in Central America, but a case has been made for an origin in eastern North America. These fruits were the first of the three sisters cultivated by the southeastern Indians. Native Americans developed many varieties of squash, but common yellow squash, scalloped squash (patty pan squash), winter squash (cushaws or kershaws), and pumpkins—valued for their sweetness and flavor—have been the most popular throughout time.
Pumpkins and winter squashes, which provided important nutrients, were stored for long periods in cool weather and could also be dried and smoked for later consumption. Drying is important, but the smoking allows for long-term storage and prevents mildew. The pumpkin rings were strung on strings and hung in the loft of a home, which would have been smoky in an Indian dwelling.
Whole pumpkins were easily cooked by setting them near the fire and rotating them periodically until the flesh became soft. Chunks were roasted or boiled, and when mashed, they are nearly indistinguishable from winter squash. Most squash recipes can be made with pumpkins. The seeds were set on a hot rock to cook until crispy. Dried pumpkin was reconstituted by adding bits to sofkee (a thin soup-like dish that was the staple of southeastern cuisine) or cornbread. Pumpkins’ sweetness was particularly prized in a day when sugar was a rare commodity.
Several varieties of gourds, hard-shelled members of the squash family, were cultivated and dried to use as containers and utensils. There are also old-world gourds, sometimes referred to as calabashes. The Indians used gourds widely for storage.
Beans
Beans are an excellent protein source, and they added nutrients to the Indian diet. Native Americans cultivated beans as early as 1300 CE. The common edible bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L.) includes a bewildering number of varieties. In addition to green beans, consumed in their tender husks, shell beans—speckled, kidney, lima, pinto, and white or navy beans—were common Indian varieties. When dried, most beans were stripped from their husks and stored in baskets, gourds, and ceramic pots. Fresh green beans, with their edible husks, were commonly snapped and strung onto thin strips of sinew using tiny needles made from bone. Dried in the smoke under the rafters of the Indian house, these strings of hard, unappetizing snap beans were called “leather-britches” by Europeans. They were reconstituted by being put into water and cooked for a long time with a bit of fat or meat added for flavor. This habit, derived from the Indians, is probably the origin of the southern custom of overcooked green beans. Shelled beans were cooked, then added to stews or ground to make bean meal or flour. Bean and cornmeal patties were cooked on a hot rock to make bean bread.
Corn
Corn was the staple food of Indians throughout most of North America and supplied the majority of the calories in their diet. It is hard to over-emphasize the importance of corn in southeastern Indian life. Corn was introduced into the Mississippi Valley from Mexico slightly earlier than beans, in approximately 900 CE. It was a revolutionary food that allowed Native Americans (who had been practicing rudimentary horticulture for several thousand years) to store up food surpluses for the first time. The resulting leap in population and cultural complexity became known as the Mississippian period, which dominated the Southeast and Midwest almost until European contact. Indeed, even after the collapse of the Mississippian culture, the historic Indian diet remained substantially the same as the prehistoric diet.
These food surpluses allowed the rise of religious, military, and artistic specialists in Mississippian society and made possible community projects such as mounds and palisades, though some early mounds in the Southeast were built before the cultivation of corn. The southeastern Indian new year began with what the Creek Indians called the busk, or Green Corn Ceremony, an important and elaborate midsummer festival held to celebrate the ripening of the first corn. Houses were cleaned, sins were forgiven, and new fires were kindled. Thereafter, several varieties of corn ripened in sequence and extended the harvest until late fall.
There are more than twenty different types of corn in a variety of colors. White corn was preferred for grinding in the Southeast. Multicolored “Indian corn,” now widely sold in the autumn, is a modern hybrid variety. True Indian corn is small, like popcorn. It lacks the dent in the top of each grain that most modern corn possesses. Native Americans sometimes ate fresh corn, but they mostly dried it on the cob for storage. Corn’s ability to be dried and stored is among its greatest attributes.
The dried ears were stored in carefully maintained, elevated, basket-like cribs sealed with mud. Dried corn was cracked in a wooden mortar and pestle to make corn flour, cornmeal, and cracked corn in a variety of forms. Sometimes Native Americans simply parched the grains and ground them, producing a portable traveling food. They commonly cooked or soaked the grains in water and wood ashes (a source of lye) to separate the difficult-to-digest husk and then boiled the kernels to make hominy. Dried and ground hominy, called hominy grits, was common in Indian times, but in the modern sense, hominy grits merely refers to coarsely cracked corn. Fine grits were used in a variety of dishes and to make cornmeal.
Interestingly, the widespread Indian habit of making hominy or adding wood ash to flavor corn dishes not only made the corn more digestible but also released niacin, an essential B vitamin. Europeans wholeheartedly adopted corn as a food, but not the addition of alkaline ashes. People who ate a corn diet without other sources of niacin, notably poor southerners, suffered from deadly and debilitating pellagra (vitamin B deficiency) into modern times. Classically, the symptoms of pellagra were the “Three-Ds”—diarrhea, dermatitis, and dementia. The Indians avoided these problems through the addition of niacin.
Fresh corn or hominy was mixed with beans, squash, and other ingredients to make vegetable stews. Combining a grain with a legume provides a dish that is high in nutrients. Specifically, corn lacks lysine, an essential amino acid available in beans. When combined, corn and beans provide protein in the diet. Succotash is a Narragansett Indian dish taught to the Pilgrims in the Northeast, but similar vegetable stews were widespread. Corn flour and meal were mixed with bear fat and cooked on a hot hearth rock to make pones and cakes. Using a hot rock, skillet, or hoe-blade to cook small pones—hoecakes or Johnnycakes—became a staple of southern cooking. Later, as different cooking techniques were adopted by Native Americans, they began to bake cornbread. Baking cornbread required a Dutch oven, which was not common in Indian life until the nineteenth century.
The most common southeastern Indian dish was sofkee. A large pot of sofkee was always available in Indian households, and everyone—family and visitors—was invited to reach into it whenever they wished with a ladle-like wooden spoon and eat their fill. There are many sofkee recipes. Some were very thin, essentially a corn beverage with a sour taste, often flavored with other ingredients. Other sofkee was thicker and contained additional foods, like pieces of meat or fish, in which case it was called sofkee-nitkee—“sofkee with bits.” The southern enthusiasm for grits (thick sofkee) is a direct link to our Indian heritage.
Sagamite is a Native American stew made from hominy or cracked corn and the addition of animal grease. Additional ingredients may include vegetables, wild rice, brown sugar, beans, smoked fish, or bits of meat. This dish likely evolved from the Mississippi Valley, notably from early French times, though the sugar would be a later addition. Caddo sagamite (a type of sagamite made by the Caddo Nation) was a thick soup made from corn flour that had previously been parched and ground into a fine meal. Beans and acorn flour could be added. The Caddos served the stew in large earthenware pots for crowds during ceremonies. This sounds a lot like sofkee, itself an inexact term, and we should note that all these Indian foods had local, tribal, and regional Indian names, as heard through several centuries, written and preserved by visitors speaking at least three different languages. An attempt to establish a consistant lexicon would be difficult. (This calls to mind a Hall family story in which John Hall’s oldest uncle, born around 1880, always referred to Thanksgiving dressing as “cush,” his grandfather William Hall’s term. Much later, we discovered this was a Civil War name for a camp mush made from cornmeal and bacon fat cooked in a frying pan. Was this sagamite? Maybe.)
A variety of cornmeal dishes was made by tying up little packages of corn and bean meal in corn shucks, then boiling them. Sometimes they contained bits of meat and beans. We are familiar with tamales—certainly a Mexican Indian legacy. But shuck bread—variously known as bean bread, “broadswords,” or Cherokee tamales—was made with hominy and beans wrapped in shucks and was a well-known southeastern dish. Balls of dough were boiled as dumplings and possibly evolved into hushpuppies when frying in lard became customary. Well known in modern times, “Indian Fry-bread” is a recent addition, probably connected with lard and wheat flour provided by government rations.
Hominy, grits, beans, sweet potatoes, and many other foods are the legacy of the region’s Indian peoples. Indeed, many traditional American Thanksgiving dinner foods—such as turkey, cornmeal dressing, green beans, sweet potatoes, squash, pumpkin pie, cornbread, pinto beans, cranberries, tomatoes, and peppers—all come from Native Americans. It has been estimated that perhaps 60 percent of the world’s food is native to the Americas.
Today, the typical modern Indian diet shares many of the unhealthy aspects of the mainstream American diet—heavy in fats and starches. Unfortunately, many conditions and diseases associated with the western diet: including obesity, high blood pressure, heart disease, and diabetes—now affect Native American populations as well. Indeed, the markedly disproportionate prevalence of diabetes in Indian communities may have its roots in the introduction of fatty meats into their diet. Leaders of several Indian nations have advocated a return to traditional foods as a means to combat these ills.
Other Important Native American Food Sources
Greens and Native Plants
The southern enthusiasm for poke salad, pokeweed, or poke salet (Phytolacca americana) is surely inherited from the Indians. The plant is normally deemed poisonous, particularly its roots and berries, so the necessity of changing the water while preparing the leaves indicates that the Indians had considerable experience with the plant.
River cane, a native bamboo, covered the abandoned Indian fields and open forests of the river bottoms. River cane and its smaller sibling, arrow cane, were important and useful plants to the southeastern Indians. A large grass, it bears nutritious seeds the size of wheat. It bloomed irregularly, perhaps every thirty to fifty years, but there was so much of it and so varied were its genetics that large amounts of its sprouts could be harvested most every year. The Indians ground and winnowed it and used it in sofkee and sagamite. More common was the practice of eating tender, young cane shoots. Other early natural foods, such as amaranth and fiddlehead ferns like bamboo, did not retain their popularity in the modern diet.
food with Indians and was also used in medicines for skin diseases and rheumatism. All parts of the plant are poisonous, and the stems and leaves require careful preparation to be eaten. The roots are never safe to eat. [Adobe Stock]
The common wild palm of the Deep South, cabbage palm or palmetto, has a very edible terminal bud located at the base of its youngest leaves. So desirable is this cabbage-like bud that the harvest eventually had to be regulated to prevent the plant’s extirpation. The smaller saw palmetto has plentiful and nutritious fruit, attractive to bears and people alike.
Roots
Sweet potatoes are native to the new world, though there is confusion over the very early presence of sweet potatoes in Polynesia and Asia, perhaps indicating some kind of pre-Columbian contact in the Pacific. It is also not clear whether the Native Americans in the southeast were growing sweet potatoes in prehistoric times, before the Spanish brought them to the mainland from the West Indies. However, Alabama Indians were growing sweet potatoes (Ipomoea batatas, a morning glory relative) during early historic times. William Bartram noted them and thought they were introduced from the Caribbean islands, perhaps with the slave trade. Nutritious, delicious, economical, and easy to grow, sweet potatoes have long been a favorite food of southerners.
Enslaved Africans, familiar with the similarly shaped, but botanically very different and much starchier, yam (genus Dioscordia), a native of Africa, are probably responsible for the southern disagreement over what that orange thing is that you eat for Thanksgiving. The confusion over yams and sweet potatoes is so common that the Food & Drug Administration prohibits labeling sweet potatoes “yams” unless they are accompanied by the disclaimer “sweet potatoes.” Unless you frequent upscale markets or specifically seek them out, true yams are nearly impossible to find. No matter how fondly you remember your sainted grandma’s “candied yams,” they were almost surely sweet potatoes. People have firm opinions on this score, so we would rather defer that argument, especially because it is more likely to end heatedly: “Pistols. Dawn. City limits. You granny-insulting scoundrel, you!”
Also available to the Indians was the wild sweet potato or “Man-o’-the-Earth” (Ipomoea pandurata). These are the beautiful mid-summer morning-glories of the roadside with large white blossoms and deep purple centers. Its large (15–30 pound) starchy tuber is unappetizing but edible. Perhaps this is another one of those things, like possums, whose edibility depends on how hungry you are. White coontie is another edible root. This is the potato-like root of Smilax, the large thorny greenbrier of southern woods.
It was cut up and pounded to mash with a mortar and pestle. The mash was washed in water, the hard bits were strained out, and the white powdery residue was dried as a reddish flour. The dry coontie flour made a nutritious, gelatin-like food, usually mixed with meal or corn flour. It also found its way into thin sofkee as a beverage or was made into hotcakes. In Florida the Seminoles who lived in the range of the tropical plant Zamia pumila used its starchy roots extensively and called it “red coontie.” Zamia, a cycad, contains a serious poison and requires a complicated series of washing and fermenting stages before it is safe to eat. Nevertheless, it was an important food for Florida Indians.
Other roots include groundnuts (Apios americana) and manioc (also known as taro). A tropical species, manioc was another root requiring extensive preparation before being safe to eat. Native Americans also harvested water lotus for its round seeds and roots, arrowhead or duck potato, and cattail roots.
Foods from Hunting and Fishing
Hunting and fishing supplemented the three sisters. Meat provided additional protein, fat, and nutritive variety and was greatly sought, but it was not as prevalent in the traditional southeastern Indian diet as it is in the modern American diet. Hunting was an important activity for men and boys, allowing them to acquire valuable food and accrue status and training for warfare. Deer, turkeys, passenger pigeons, small birds and mammals, fish, mussels, crayfish, and turtles found their way into the pot. White-tailed deer, an important source of food and material, was dried into jerky on racks over smoky fires. Boys armed with blowguns stalked birds and varmints, preparing for the important day when they could graduate to a bow.
For much of the eighteenth century, deerskins were in great demand in Britain and Europe, where they were made into high-end clothing, gloves, hats, and other leather products. Several waves of cattle plague during the early eighteenth century caused a chronic leather shortage in Europe. In the American South, the deerskin trade was of supreme importance. It was the major source of trade material to exchange for European goods. With the men in the woods for long periods of time in pursuit of the several hundred or so deer they needed to kill in a season, the deerskin trade dramatically changed the cultural dynamic of southeastern Indian towns as the adult population relocated to hunting territories for long periods during winter months.
Bears. Despite falling into disrepute in modern times—mainly because we eat too much of it—fat was and remains an important part of the diet. Though deer meat is an excellent source of protein, it has little fat. Bears, on the other hand, boast large amounts of fat and were highly prized. They were hunted in the fall when they were at their fattest, in special areas set aside for that purpose. Early European traders and visitors agreed that bear ribs, barbequed and dripping with fat, were the best meat on the frontier. Bear fat was carefully collected and saved. Traditionally, it was the most important source of cooking oil and had numerous other uses, including paint-mixing and repelling mosquitoes.
Domesticated Animals. With the gradual decline of the South’s deer population due to overhunting in the eighteenth century, many Indians began keeping cattle; however, cattle were often a disaster for cornfields. Creeks, in particular, took to cattle ranching by the end of the eighteenth century, and cattle raising became a man’s activity. Ahaya, or Cowkeeper, William Bartram’s Seminole friend and sponsor, was one of the first Indians to realize the great value of cattle-raising on the Alachua prairies south of Gainesville, Florida. In that day the Southeast’s small, disease-resistant Spanish cattle were primarily valued for their hides, but beef was rapidly incorporated into the Indian diet. Eighteenth-century Chickasaws were known for the high quality of hogs around their towns, and chickens also entered the Indian diet as they were introduced by deerskin traders. The introduction of pigs into the Southeast, traditionally believed to be by Hernando de Soto in the 1540s (but more certainly by early Europeans along the coast), proved a mixed blessing. You can turn pigs loose in the forest, and they will breed and prosper on wild nuts and produce. They also are relatively easy to catch using dogs. Eventually, though, the high amount of fat in pigs would prove detrimental to everyone’s health.
River Foods. Indian towns were usually on a bluff near creeks and rivers, adjacent to fields on the river’s bottomlands. The residents were well aware of the river’s flooding history, and they positioned their towns with care. Regular floods inundated the fields and deposited nutrients, making long-term agriculture possible. Other southeastern groups positioned their towns and fields along the rivers in the same way. Hernando de Soto’s recorders reported the towns of the Coosa Valley in 1540 as being continuous, one town’s fields blending into those of adjacent towns. So memorable was the productivity of the area that twenty years later, veterans of the de Soto expedition, now starving in Pensacola with the Tristan de Luna expedition, proposed journeying north to find food. They arrived only to discover the huge population along the Coosa destroyed by disease and the fields largely barren.
The Indian towns’ proximity to rivers meant that fishing was a common form of protein gathering. The undammed rivers sported enormous annual migrations of breeding fish: channel-filling runs of sturgeon, mullet, menhaden, eels, shad, paddlefish, suckers, and buffalo. Harvesting fish in creeks and small rivers often involved the construction of stone fish-weirs. These were bank-to-bank chevrons of large stones forming a barrier to upstream migrations. Many of these were constructed so robustly that they can still be seen, especially during low water. Traps or nets blocked openings in the weir, and everyone probably dropped what they were doing to harvest and preserve enormous quantities of fish during the run. Generally not having large quantities of salt, the towns probably smoked a lot of fish. Indeed, smoking was the preferred method of preservation. Still, the most common way of storing food was simply to eat it and grow fat. Hard times leaned everyone down—it was part of the cycle of life.
Fishing with spears or arrows was also common. The trick was to position yourself by an opening in the weir, or another commonly used channel, and be patient. (Sound familiar?) Less commonly, Indians also angled with bait or even artificial flies. Bartram describes in detail how the Indians tied feathers around a hook to make a “bob” and dabbled it in the water to catch predacious varieties like bass, known in the South as “trout,” well into modern times. An avid fisherman, Bartram was probably the first visitor to the South to record catching fish on an artificial bait. He also had to kill a large alligator that followed him (and his string of fish) into camp one night. In his famous Travels, he wrote: “I soon dispatched him by lodging the contents of my gun in his head, and then proceeded to cleanse and prepare my fish for supper.” Now that would make a reality show!
Native Fruits and Imported Fruits
Native fruits and seasonally gathered wild produce were important parts of the Indian diet. This gathering habit remained crucial even into modern times. Among the common varieties of berries gathered were blackberries, dewberries, blueberries, huckleberries, strawberries, elderberries, paw-paws, maypops (passion-flower fruit), plums (several varieties—modern plums descend from them), wild cherries, grapes, and muscadines. Like today, these were locally common in good habitats. You can bet that the Indians and their successors knew where they grew. A lot of these are associated with the open understories caused by frequent forest fires, once the common environmental arbiter of the South. Many of these small fruits are no longer common in the no-fire jungles of the modern southern landscape.
Red mulberries (Morus rubra) are native and common. Their red and black fruits are plentiful, and they were dried by the Indians or mixed with corn flour. Persimmons, with their large sweet fruit, were particularly prized. They were mashed, and their pulp was separated from their seeds, mixed with corn flour, and dried for later. Honey locust, an unappealing foot-long brown bean, is in fact full of a sweet orange pulp. The tree, covered in grotesque six-inch thorns, is something of a relic from the Ice Age, when its oversized thorns protected the foliage from large grazing animals.
Imported fruits also became an important part of the Native American diet, eaten fresh or dried in the sun for later use. Peaches were introduced very early by the Spanish, and orchards of up to three hundred trees were recorded in established Indian towns. Apples were probably introduced by the French and were grown at Fort Toulouse. Oranges arrived with the Spanish. They escaped to the wild and were common in the Deep South. The Indians (and Bartram) were well aware of their culinary virtues and commonly roasted them in the coals of the fire. Here and there were groves of purple figs, also a legacy from the French and Spanish. Watermelons and muskmelons were spread early on by Indian horticulturalists. Philip Gosse, a naturalist who visited Alabama in 1839, reported the popularity of watermelons and noted that the ones he saw were white-fleshed.
Indians rapidly embraced new foods from Europe, Asia, Africa, and Central America, including foods destined to become staples of “southern” cuisine, such as okra and black-eyed peas.
Seeds and Nuts
Native Americans relied on seeds and nuts to a degree we may not appreciate. Among the seeds were sunflower, amaranth, sumac berries, pecans, hickory nuts, chestnuts, and white oak acorns. The chestnut and its smaller cousin, the chinquapin, were valuable to the Native Americans; however, they have been gone from the landscape for almost one hundred years. The chestnut blight was introduced to America in 1904 and quickly killed essentially all of both species. But before then, the species flourished from the mountains to the Gulf. In some areas, one out of every four forest trees was a chestnut. Their big, nutritious nuts fed deer, bears, pigs, Indians, and settlers. The Indians offered de Soto’s men chestnut bread in 1540. The forest is certainly a less-productive food source without these trees.
Acorns, particularly low-tannin white oak acorns, are also an under-appreciated food resource. Acorns can be shelled, crushed in a mortar, and boiled in water to remove the bitter tannins. Some varieties, notably live oak acorns, can be eaten with a minimum of preparation. They are nutritious, keep well, and are used to make acorn bread.
Hickory nuts were processed by the basketful. Bartram reports knowing a native family that possessed “above 100 bushels.” They crushed them in a mortar and, by boiling and straining, separated the shells, nutmeats, and oil. The meat was used in bread and cakes, and the flavorful oil was commonly used in cooking and baking. Sometimes mixed with honey and thin sofkee, it was known as hickory milk, a favorite beverage.
The nutmeats and oil were valuable trade items. Bartram notes that the Indians “cultivated” wild nut trees. This cultivation may have extended less to formal orchard planting (though the Indians did plant fruit orchards) than the selection of forest trees, protecting good bearers and clearing around them to facilitate harvest and growth of the trees. Several ecologists, noting the particular richness of eastern forests in nut species, have suggested that millennia of the Indians’ encouragement of nut species may have dramatically altered the forests.
Pecans, the small-fruited variety, were native to Alabama but were not cultivated as a crop in the Southeast until the late nineteenth century. Black walnuts and butternuts also were available, but because of their heavy shells, they were probably used as much for their dye qualities as for their difficult-to-process meat and oil. Black walnut and pecan ice cream are still favorites.
Sassafras’s aromatic roots were widely known as a flavoring (root beer) and a tonic to cure general malaise. They were a major export of the early colonial economy. Whole shiploads left the east coast for Europe. Also in use in the South were powdered sassafras leaves, or filé, which was used extensively as a thickening agent for stews and soups. Filé gumbo, clearly an African/Indian dish, may be derived from the Choctaw word kombo and was originally served over (what else?) grits.
Tobacco
As long as we’re on the subject of leaves, nicotine-rich tobacco was surely present in Indian gardens. Nicotiana rustica, the native tobacco that produced a harsh, potent smoke, was cultivated widely, particularly in the West Indies, where it was grown by slaves. It became a hugely profitable Spanish export. But in 1614, John Rolfe of Virginia began to export a superior variety smuggled from Trinidad. Nicotiana tabacum was mild enough to be inhaled and became North America’s first cash crop. It was greatly admired and hugely profitable. The Indians originally used Nicotiana rustica ceremonially and socially, often mixing it with other herbs, and generally leaving abuse of it to the Europeans.
Black Drink
Orchards seem to have come easily to southeastern Indians, possibly from their experience at transplanting yaupon holly trees from the coastal plain to towns 150 miles inland from their natural range. Yaupon (the American term for it—the Indians called it cassine) was the source of a caffeine-rich, black-colored drink: the sacred ceremonial drink of southeastern Indian men. It was not considered a food; rather, they drank the strong, dark, and ill-smelling concoction made from the leaves in a religious purification ceremony. The black drink ceremony, held before any significant event—war, marriage, stickball games, house building, and greeting visitors—involved ritual vomiting. Despite appearances, the vomiting was not due to some poisonous property associated with the plant. European visitors took part in these ceremonies but did not report getting sick, nor did vomiting always occur. The vomiting was apparently voluntary and ritualistic, but the alarming story attached itself to the plant and gave rise to its Latin name, Ilex vomitoria—the “vomiting holly.”
Interestingly, early French and Spanish settlers used the same plant to make a lighter tea that still contained enough caffeine to addict them. This drew the ire of the church, which had a similar experience in Mexico and which complained that the cassine habit “was as bad as chocolate!” Someone obviously told the French and Spanish about it; they didn’t go wandering through the woods, teapot in hand, hoping to discover tea. The secret of the Indian tea might have come from the Indian women, who were not welcome in the male black drink ceremonies but were canny enough not to miss out on the major caffeine source in North America. One would assume that Americans would quickly pick up on the habit of drinking our own native tea, but yaupon was forever déclassé—the drink of “savages,” escaped slaves, and poor whites. Besides, there was that nasty vomiting story. It has never been popular with white Americans, though it briefly had a revival in the Civil War South when coffee was blockaded. Caffeine-starved southerners dubbed it Confederate Tea—and went right back to coffee when the unpleasantness was over. In South America, the nearly identical plant, Ilex paraguariensis, lacks such bad associations and is the source of mate—yerba mate—the greatly admired national drink of several nations.
Contrast this experience with that of chocolate, which as cultivated by the Aztecs and Mayans. The Spanish quickly saw its potential as an export, and it became wildly popular and expensive. It was long drunk as a dark caffeinated beverage, like coffee, but in 1727, Englishman Nicholas Sanders invented milk chocolate, elevating it from the merely mortal to the divine.
Imported Food Culture: Foods New to the Native American Diet
The dramatic exchange of plants, animals, weeds, and microbes, as well as technology and culture between the Americas and Europe, came to be called the Columbian Exchange. Corn, beans, squash, and a variety of other “New World” foods found their way to Europe in the wake of permanent contact between “old” and “new” worlds. At the same time, other foods were introduced into America, including chicken, wheat, barley, rice, okra, turnips, collards, cowpeas, cucumbers, muskmelons, oranges, and peaches.
Some introduced foods didn’t find much of a foothold in the Indian diet. The European grains—wheat, rye, oats, and barley—did not take hold because they generally require plows to cultivate. Also, Indians simply preferred their traditional foods. Interestingly, rice cultivation did take hold among the Native American communities.
Cucumbers were slow to find an Indian home. Some crops that were initially rejected later returned to find a place in the American South’s diet. Turkeys, white potatoes, peppers, tomatoes, and peanuts were among the reintroduced. Tomatoes and peppers slowly gained approval, but they were widely considered to be poisonous members of the nightshade family and were only a limited part of the American diet until the nineteenth century. In fact, peppers spread to Europe and Asia first, then reappeared in North America. However, there were locally wild and introduced peppers in the South that were used as flavoring. A variety of wild onions was also present, and the Indians adopted European varieties as well.
The common potato was first domesticated by the Andean Indians and brought back to Europe as early as 1570 by Spanish explorers. In Europe white potatoes were long considered coarse food for poor people. In nineteenth-century Europe and Ireland, potatoes were a crucial dietary resource for the masses, but they were essentially uneaten by the upper classes. So dependent on potatoes were the underclasses that when the fungal potato blight struck Ireland (and Europe) in the 1840s, it killed nearly half of some populations and caused the great Irish emigration that figures so largely in American history. Potatoes are not common in the American diet until the nineteenth century and were slow to become part of the North American Indian diet.
Green peas, lentils, soybeans, and cowpeas originated in the Old World (Africa and Southwest Asia). The cowpeas (black-eyed peas, crowder peas, and field-peas), which were impervious to heat, drought, and poor soil, quickly earned a place in the southern diet. Okra is African. Both peas and okra accompanied the slave trade into the hot, dry South. So did peanuts. Actually native to the highlands of South America, peanuts made their way to Africa with the Portuguese. They did so well in Africa that when peanuts appeared in the American South, they were commonly thought to be African and picked up an African nickname along the way—goober peas. Everyone liked goober peas, and Confederates sang, “Peas, peas, peas, peas, eating goober peas. Goodness how delicious, eating goober peas!” Later, Dr. George Washington Carver notably encouraged them as a modern crop.
Cabbages, collards, and turnips are European in origin, but they entered the American South fairly early. They were particularly appreciated by Africans, who were accustomed to eating leafy vegetables in their homelands. Africans are probably responsible for the popularity of greens in the South, certainly collards. Interestingly, there is a division running across the South called the Collard Line, above which the people eat turnip greens and below which collards prevail. (Yankees even eat turnip roots, but the less said about them the better.)
Bees, and the byproduct of honey, were a European introduction that spread across Florida and into the southern interior in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Sugar cane comes a bit later from Africa via the Caribbean islands.
All of these foods merged with the foods native to the Indians of the Southeast. Eventually the foods became part of a new food tradition that can be experienced at many tables across the South.
This article first appeared in Alabama Heritage magazine, Issue 125, Summer 2017.
Grab your copy to learn more.
About the Authors
John C. Hall was a frequent contributor to Alabama
Heritage magazine. He has written articles on Hernando de Soto, William Bartram, Prince Madoc, and the Sylacauga Meteorite. He served as a naturalist at the Alabama Museum of Natural History and also as director of the Black Belt Museum at the University of West Alabama. With environmental photographer Beth Maynor Young, he was the coauthor of Headwaters, a Journey on Alabama Rivers (University of Alabama Press, 2009). He was also an author credited for Longleaf: As Far as the Eye Can See (University of North Carolina Press, 2012). He passed away in 2016 and is dearly missed by his family, friends, and colleagues. Alabama Heritage thanks him for his contributions to this magazine, our state, and the history community.
Rosa Newman Hall retired from the Alabama Museum of Natural History after doing programs and serving as the camp director for the Museum Expedition program, started by her late husband Dr. John Hall in 1979. The Museum Expedition will celebrate its thirty-ninth year this year at Old Cahawba. For over twenty years, she has performed living history programs as a Creek woman from the 1800s at museums and festivals all over the Southeast. With a hunting camp set up, she demonstrates cooking, discusses foods, highlights the woman’s role in the society, as well as describes the deer skin trade and how it affected the Creek Nation. Hall currently performs similar activities at the University of West Alabama with the Center for the Study of the Black Belt.
